What Shall We Do With The Royal Mail?
I get very little useful mail today and haven’t for about ten years. My friends either, e-mail, text or phone me and all of my banks, utilities are on line. The only important post I get is tickets for various events, I’ve ordered on-line or by telephone and the odd small package delivered by the postman, like my INR test strips.
Most of the rest of the mail is junk usually addressed to the Occupier of my house. Make non-specific junk mail illegal and the Royal Mail would go bust. The worst offenders are estate agents and Virgin Media. I think I’ll get some cards printed, that I can post to the worst offenders, saying they will be charged £50 for wasting my time, if they send anything more.
Incidentally, I do post letters more regularly than I used to, as I have a post box on the corner.
Most of us love the Royal Mail and in rural and sparsely populated areas, I will admit, they do perform a regular social service. But where I live now in Hackney, I wouldn’t even recognise my postman, if I sat next to him in a pub or cafe. We though have a guy, who performs that low-level social service. We have this very accommodating guy, who keeps the streets clean and tidy, with his barrow and he always wishes you a hello and how are you, every time, you meet him on the street.
The real problem, I have is with parcels and packets, delivered by all of the companies and not just Parcelforce and Royal Mail. Usually, they come early in the morning, when I am still here, but often I return to find a card through the door.
Royal Mail/Parcelforce are in a strong position to create a proper on-line tracking service, as they are generally trusted.
You would need to register your name and address on their site, so that if you were getting a parcel delivery, they could send you an e-mail to say it was coming. I know some on-line vendors do this, but it often means logging in to a site and entering a tracking number, which means you have to have on-line skills.
Obviously, you wouldn’t always get an e-mail before it arrived, but you could have standing instructions like leave with number 27 or something similar.
A properly designed system would make it more efficient and probably save the Royal Mail money.
The first courier that gets it right and completes the loop between supplier and customer, will make a fortune and clean up.
Privatisation is not the cure, but augmenting the local link with technology may just be.
Just look at how easy it is to track trains and collect tickets at stations, compared to say ten years ago.
The Anonymous Widower 
What we really need is local collection points for parcels. Garages, corner shops, cafes, etc. could earn money by offering to take parcels for collection by their owners at times convenient for those owners. An authorisation email would be required to prove that the person collecting was authorised. The first parcel carrier to introduce such a system would corner a good chunk of the parcel market. The cost saving from not having to deliver to each front door would pay for the collection points.
Anyone interested in starting a business? Just joking.
Comment by John Wright | May 7, 2013 |
For a lot of people myself included local collection points aren’t a good idea. If I know a parcel is coming tomorrow and I’ll be out, I want to tell them to say deliver it next door or in the cafe opposite. The last parcel that I had delivered was 36 bottles of gluten free beer. I don’t want to have to carry that from a local collection point. As it was the courier left them next door, which was fine. But I should be able to put a default message, as to what to do with the parcel. Depending on the parcel, I might want to stay in to get it.
Comment by AnonW | May 7, 2013 |